Candid’s brain

This is the output of gpg-sign that I’ve recently got:

You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Candid Dauth "
1024-bit DSA key, ID F76ADFE9, created 2005-04-10

gpg: problem with the agent: No pinentry
gpg: no default secret key: General error
gpg: [stdin]: clearsign failed: General error

Hit return to continue.

The pinentry setting in my ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf looked this way:

pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-qt -g

The fix is easy: just remove the -g flag, as GPG newly seems to look for a file called “pinentry-qt -g”, which of course does not exist.

As always I have encountered lots of problems while trying to configure a second monitor on my Intel 855GM card. X just did not start, here is some of the output:

(WW) intel(0): Bad V_BIOS checksum
(II) intel(0): Primary V_BIOS segment is: 0xc000
(EE) intel(0): detecting sil164
(EE) intel(0): Unable to read from DVOI2C_E Slave 112.
(EE) intel(0): Unable to read from DVOI2C_E Slave 236.
(EE) intel(0): ivch: Unable to read register 0x00 from DVOI2C_B:04.
(EE) intel(0): Unable to read from DVOI2C_E Slave 112.
(EE) intel(0): tfp410 not detected got VID FFFFFFFF: from DVOI2C_E Slave 112.
(WW) intel(0): xf86AllocateGARTMemory: allocation of 10 pages failed
        (Cannot allocate memory)

During my research, I have found some interesting projects that could be useful to fix other problems with the Intel driver: i810switch, 915resolution and i855crt.

The common Intel driver fix was the simple solution: downgrade from the intel driver (in my case, both version 2.1.1 and 2.2.1 did not work) to the old i810 driver (the most recent seems to be 1.7.4). Don’t forget to change the driver in your xorg.conf, see mine for comparision.

One issue though is buggy with version 1: XRANDR does not work. As soon as any application (most common for me were the kdesktop kcontrol module and wine) tries to use that, the second monitor gets black and is not recognised anymore. You can still move your mouse (and thus windows) there, but the whole thing does not work like it should. I disabled XRANDR by adding Option "RANDR" "disabled" to the Extensions section.